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3D Virtualization Edges Toward the Mainstream
Roland Piquepaille writes "With recent improvements in graphic cards and in powerful Linux-based PC clusters, virtual 3D prototypes are rapidly replacing actual physical prototypes in a wide range of industries, including early adopters such as aerospace or car companies. But now, software designers are also incorporating sound and tactile feedbacks to their Virtual Reality (VR) systems for real product development. In this long article, Desktop Engineering gives several examples of these new VR developments. But even if PC clusters and off-the-shelf graphic cards are cheap, a state-of-the-art VR facility such as an immersive CAVE can still cost more than one million dollars, because you need to build the viewing facility and buy expensive projection systems. However, costs are still decreasing and virtual prototyping is reaching the mainstream stage. This overview contains selected excepts and comments."
I always liked CaveUT: http://www.planetjeff.net/ut/CaveUT.html
a CAVE system that uses the UnrealEngine (even UT2004)
A friend of mine has shutter glasses, and they really didn't do much for me when I tried them. The constant flickering - remember, you now only have half the refresh rate - gave me a headache, and the sense of depth was very weak.
I suggest that before buying shutter glasses, one should check these things. I know I'm very sensitive to flickering, anything below 85Hz is useless to me. In "real-world" seeing I don't work off the stereoscopic vision for depth perception, I expect that this causes the weak improvement. (You can test this easily by closing one eye for an extended period of time. Some people start "grabbing air", while others just carry on as normal)
~phil
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Very valid points, all of them. It sucks that they didn't work for you, but for me -- the "did it" after a fair amount of tweaking. The pitch-black room was the thing that helped the most for me -- that reduced the sensation of flickering and increased the depth and rise a lot. I actually wish my glasses were full goggles because I think most of the flicker I experience now is because even when my eye is "blacked" I'm still seeing ambient light from the monitor.
Tweaking the refresh rate was very important in my experiments with these too -- the LCDs on the glasses do take time to change state so it's important to find the fastest rate that the glasses can sustain.
Question -- did the glasses you played with support the "blanking-every-other-scanline" feature? I was utterly unimpressed with mine until I found that sweetness.
And a note to everyone else: it seems that the site I mentioned has stopped selling in individual units. Although this is a sadness there are other companies.
And remember: I'm pulling for you. We're all in this together.
--Fjornir
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
This is partially a shameless plug, but there is also some incredible things we can do with VR in terms of social science/psychology research.
just image any research where you have to record video/audio and then hire a bunch of psych 1 students to encode what they see for analysis (which is EXREMELY BIASED). now with VR, we can just record the position/orientation of the subject and use statistical methods (i.e. SPSS+MatLab) to crunch numbers (completely unbiased). Where I work, we have come up with some exciting discoveries.
I don't want to write a book here, so check out http://vhil.stanford.edu/